Energy management system controller for a rural microgrid

Abstract

An energy management system (EMS) for an isolated microgrid in a typical rural location is presented. The rural microgrid consists of locally available renewable energy resources, such as solar, wind, along with diesel generator for backup and battery as storage to meet the electrical load demand. The grid electricity supply in the village is characterised by frequent outages with the poor quality of supply. Firstly, the proposed system controller’s (PSC) dispatch rules are formulated using MATLAB. Then, PSC rules designed in MATLAB are integrated with hybrid optimisation of multiple electric renewables (HOMER PRO) software to design an isolated microgrid. A detailed techno-economic analysis is presented to obtain the cost-effective sizing of the microgrid considering a yearly load growth over the project lifetime. Finally, to show the effectiveness, a comparative analysis of the PSC with the inbuilt load following controller of the HOMER PRO is also illustrated. Also, a simple procedure showing the integration of MATLAB with HOMER PRO is outlined briefly.